While doing research for an online educational resource I write for, I ran across your blog and thought you may be interested in an idea for a post I have been thinking about.

The fate of schools in California is tied to the financial health of the state and because of years of economic downturn and recession, the state can no longer support the schools and the price of tuition is skyrocketing. This is making attending college considerably more difficult for many qualified applicants.

I would love to write about this for your blog. Let me know if you’re interested and I will send you a full outline.

Thanks!

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Lately I’m also informed about dead links at my blog. How kind. Three guesses which link is offered instead…..

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Hi Laika Spoetnik,

I came across your website and wanted to notify you about a broken link on your page in case you weren’t aware of it. The link on http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2009/06 which links to http://www.visi.com/juan/congress is no longer working. I’ve included a link to a useful page on Members of Congress that you could replace the broken link with if you’re interested in updating your website. Thanks for providing a great resource!

On numerous occasions [1,2,3] I have warned against top Twitter and Blog lists spread by education affiliate sites.
Sites like accreditedonlinecolleges.com, onlinecolleges.com, onlinecollegesusa.org, onlinedegrees.com, mbaonline.com.

While some of the published Twitter Top 50 lists and Blog top 100 lists may be interesting as such (or may flatter you if you’re on it), the only intention of the makers is to lure you to their site and earn money through click-throughs.

“I get endless emails from people with these kinds of sites telling me I am on such and such a list…I even get different messages claiming to be from different people, but actually the same email address.They’re splogs and link bait scams almost always and unfortunately some people get suckered into linking to them, giving them credence and publicity. They’re a pain in the ‘arris.

These education sites do not only produce these “fantabulous” top 50 and 100 lists.
I also receive many requests for guest-authorships, and undoubtedly I’m not the only one.

Recently I also received a request from mbaonlinedegrees to post an infographic:

“While searching for resources about the internet, I came across your site and noticed that you had posted the ‘State of the Internet’ video. I wanted to reach out as I have an infographic about the topic that I think would be a great fit for your site.”

But this mba.onlinedegrees infographic was a simple, yes even simplistic, summary of “a day at the internet”:

How many emails are sent, blog posts are made, how many people visit Facebook and how many updates are updated, and so forth and so on. Plus: Internet users spend 14.6 minutes viewing porn online: the average fap session is 12 minutes…(How would they know?)

Anyway not the kind of information my readers are looking for. So I didn’t write a post with the embedding the code for the infographic.

Thus these online education affiliate sites produce top 50 and 100 lists, blogposts, guestposts and infographics and promote their use by actively approaching bloggers and people on Twitter.

I was surprised to find¹, however that even the high quality Scientific Americanscience blog“Observations“ (Opinion, arguments & analyses from the editors of Scientific American) blindly linked to such a spammy infographic (just adding a short meaningless introduction) [4].

“These MBAs have a smaller brain than accountants. They don’t know the difference between asset, revenue and income”.

If such a high authority science blog does not know to separate the wheat from the chaff, does not recognize splogs as such, and does not even (at the very least) filter and track the information offered, …. than who can…. who will….?³

Sometimes I feel like a miniature version of Don Quixote…

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NOTES

1. HATTIP:

Again, @Nutsci brought this to my attention:

I see infographics from sketchy online education affiliate sites all the time. They get boosts when linked bit.ly/JLYo1J cc @laikas

2. In response to my post @AdamMerberg tweeted a link to a very interesting article in the Atlantic by Megan McArdle issuing a plea to bloggers to help stop this plague in its track. (i.e. saying: The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don’t care whether the information in their graphics is right … just so long as you link it.). She even uses an infographic herself to deliver her message. Highly recommended!

The referred article Scientific American puts a new meta-analysis of statins and an accompanying editorial in the Lancet in broader perspective. The meta-analysis suggests that healthy people over 50 should take cholesterol-lowering drugs as a preventative measure. Scientific American questions this by also addressing the background risks (low for most 50+ people), possible risks of statin use, cost-effectiveness and the issue of funding by pharmaceutical companies and other types of bias.

It is surprising how easy it (still) is for such spammy Top 50 or 100 Liststo get viral, whereas they only have been published to generate more traffic to the website and/or to earn revenue through click-throughs.

It makes me wonder why well-educated people like scientists and doctors swallow the bait. Don’t they recognize the spam? Do they feel flattered to be on the list, or do they take offence when they (or another person who “deserves” it) aren’t chosen? Or perhaps they just find the list useful and want to share it, without taking a close look?

To help you to recognize and avoid such spammy lists, here are some tips to separate the wheat from the chaff:

Check WHOmade the list. Is it from an expert in the field, someone you trust? (and/or someone you like to follow?)

If you don’t know the author in person, check the site which publishes the list (often a “blog”):

When the site itself seems ok, check whether the names on the list seem trustworthy and worth a follow. Clearly, lists with fake accounts (other then lists with “top 50 fake accounts” ;)) aren’t worth the bother: apparently the creator didn’t make the effort to verify the accounts and/or hasn’t the capacity to understand the tweets/topic.

Ideally the list should have added value. Meaning that it should be more than a summary of names and copy pasting of the bio or “about” section.For instance I have recently been put on a list of onlinecollegesusa.org [b], but the author had just copied the subtitle of my blog: …. a medical librarian and her blog explores the web 2.0 world as it relates to library science and beyond.However, sometimes, the added value may just be that the author is a highly recognized expert or opinion leader. For instance this Top Health & Medical Bloggers (& Their Twitter Names) List [5] by the well known health blogger Dean Giustini.

In what way do these lists represent *top* Blogs or Twitter accounts? Are their blogs worth reading and/or their Twitter accounts worth following? A nobel price winner may be a top scientist, but may not necessarily be a good blogger and/or may not have interesting tweets. (personally I know various examples of uninteresting accounts of *celebrities* in health, science and politics)

Beware if you are actively approached and kindly requested to spread the list to your audience. (for this is what they want).It goes like this (watch the impersonal tone):

Your Blog is being featured!

Hi There,

I recently compiled a list of the best librarian blogs, and I wanted to let you know that you made the list! You can find your site linked here: […]

If you have any feedback please let me know, or if you think your audience would find any of this information useful, please feel free to share the link. We always appreciate a Facebook Like, a Google +1, a Stumble Upon or even a regular old link back, as we’re trying to increase our readership.

Thanks again, and have a great day!

While some of the list may be worthwhile in itself, it is best NOT TO LINK TO DOUBTFUL LISTS, thus not mention them on Twitter, not retweet the lists and not blog about it. For this is what they only want to achieve.

But what if you really find this list interesting?

Here are some tips to find alternatives to these spammy lists (often opposite to above-mentioned words of caution)

Find posts/lists produced by experts in the field and/or people you trust or like to follow. Their choice of blogs or twitter-accounts (albeit subjective and incomplete) will probably suit you the best. For isn’t this what it is all about?

Especially useful are posts that give you more information about the people on the list. Like this top-10 librarian list by Phil Bradley [6] and the excellent “100+ women healthcare academics” compiled by @amcunningham and @trishgreenhalgh [7].Strikingly the reason to create the latter list was that a spammy list not recognized as such (“50 Medical School Professors You Should Be Following On Twitter” [c]) seemed short on women….

In case of Twitter-accounts:

Check existing Twitter lists of people you find interesting to follow. You can follow the entire lists or just those people you find most interesting.
Examples: I created a list with people from the EBM-cochrane people & sceptics [8]. Nutritional science grad student @Nutsci has a nutrition-health-science list [9]. The more followers, the more popular the list.

Check interesting conversation partners of people you follow.

Check accounts of people who are often retweeted in the field.

Keep an eye on #FF (#FollowFriday) mentions, where people worth following are highlighted

Check a topic on Listorious. For instance @hrana made a list of Twitter-doctors[10]. There are also scientists-lists (then again, check who made the list and who is on the list. Some health/nutrition lists are really bad if you’re interested in science and not junk)

Grand Rounds is “the weekly summary of the best healthcare writing online”. I’ve hosted this medical blog carnival twice and considered it a great honor to do so.

I have submitted a lot of posts to the Grand Rounds. Often I even wrote a special blog post to fit the theme if there was one. Almost all my submissions have been accepted. I really enjoyed the compilations. There was a lot of outstanding creativity and originality in how the links to the blogs were “aggregated” and highlighted.

Usually I only read those posts that seemed the most interesting to me (the summary thus works as a filter). But through the Grand Rounds I read posts that I would never have read and I learned about bloggers I never heard of.

Why am I talking in the past tense? The Grand Round is still there, isn’t it?!

Yes, it is still there (luckily), but the organizers are thinking of a “rejuvenation of this old dinosaur”. As the previous host, Margaret Polaneczky explained

“… Grand Rounds has dropped a bit off all of our radars. Many, if not most of us have abandoned the old RSS feed to hang out on Twitter, where our online community has grown from a few dozen bloggers to feeds and followers in the hundreds and even thousands.”

One of the measures is that the Grand Rounds editions should be more concise and only include the “best posts”.

I too go for quality, and think one should carefully select contributors (and hosts), but is the 7-year-old dinosaur to be saved by chopping him in pieces? Should we only refer to 10 posts at the max and put the message in a tweet-format like Margaret did in an experiment?
I was glad that Margaret gave a good old fashioned long introduction in the Dinosaur’s style, for that was what I read, NOT the tweets. Sorry tweets are NOT a nice compilation. They are difficult to read.
It also isn’t a solution to tweet the individual links, because a lot of those individual tweets will be missed by most of the potential readers. It is not coherent either. The strength of the Grand Rounds is in the compilation, in the way the host makes the posts digestible. I would say: let the host present the posts in an attractive way and let the reader do the selection and digestion.

Also important: how many of us will write blog posts specially for the Grand Rounds if there is a chance of 2 in 3 that it will be rejected?

It is true that the Grand Rounds is less popular than a few years ago and it is harder to get hosts. But that may partly have to do with advertising. My first Grand Rounds got far more hits than the second one, mainly because we sent a notice to great blogs that linked to us, like Instapundit (853 hits alone) and there was an interview with the host announcing the Grand Rounds at MEDSCAPE. In this way the main intended audience (non-blogging lay people) were also reached. The second time my post was just found by a handful of people checking the edition plus this blog own readers.(I have to admit that this last Grand Rounds Edition might have been better if it had been more concise, but at least one person (Pranab of Scepticemia) spend 2 hours in reading almost all the posts of the round-up. So it wasn’t for nothing)

If some busy clinicians can be persuaded to host The Grand Rounds using a shorter format, that is fine. And it is good to be more concise and leave out what isn’t of high quality. But why make it a rule to include just 10 or 12? Even more important, don’t change blog posts for tweets. For I don’t think, as Margaret passed on, that the concept of the individual blog has been sometimes “overshadowed by Twitter and Facebook, whose continual unending stream demands our constant attention, lest we miss something important that someone said or re-said…” Even I have given up to constantly follow all streams, and I suppose the same is true for most clinicians, nurses etc. Lets not replace posts by tweets but lets use Twitter and Facebook to promote the Grand Rounds and augment its radius.

Grand Rounds is evolving as a more focused, curated publication. Rather than a 4,000 word chain-o-links, Nick Genes, Val Jones and others felt that a focused collection of recommendations would be more manageable for both readers and hosts. This is Grand Rounds for quality rather than link love.

It isn’t contacts, followers, friends, subscriptions, readers, link love, mentions, or people’s attention. It’s time. With time I can have all of these things.

“Link love” and “chain-o-links” undervalue what blog carnivals are about. Perhaps some bloggers just want to be linked to, but most want to be read, and that is the entire idea behind the blog carnival. I can’t imagine that the blog hosts aim to include as many links as possible. At the most it is lovefor particular posts not “link love” perse.

Changing the format to tweets (♬♫) will only increase the link/text ratio. Links will become more prominent.

I would rather go for the ♥♥-links*, because I ♥ to blog and I ♥ to read good stuff.

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* Note that ♥♥-links is not the same as link-♥

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Here is a short Twitter Discussion about the new approach. I fully agree with Ves Dimov viewpoint, especially the last tweet.

All you have to do is to subscribe to the blog in the form of an email alert. People, like me, who are already subscribers are also eligible to participate in the drawings. (see this post for all info)

With so many ‘golden oldies’ around, I wonder about you, my audience. Do you blog? And if you do, for how long? Please tell me in the poll below.

If you are a (bio)medical, library or science blogger (blogging in English), I would appreciate if you could fill in this spreadsheet as well. You are free to edit the spreadsheet and add names of other bloggers as well.

Doctor Ves (drVes) and Berci discussed various examples of blogs that had grown in a way: a blog that branched from blog to most popular podcast/physician-radio host (Dr. Anonymous), Kevinmd.com starting from a solo blog with 2-line snippets to a HuffPost-style conglomerate, DiabetesMine becoming a group voice with increasing popularity and industry recognition and Dean Giustini’s start from blog to the openmedicine journal based on WordPress.

And while those are all great examples, I just wondered whether growth from single to multi-authored blogs is per definition “the best” and something one should strive for. Does growth in number of authors automatically mean: “growth” of the blog? And in what respect? Is sheer growth of traffic and a greater audience the most important?

This blog regularly had guest posts in the pasts and they were surely an enrichment. Shamsha Damani was the main contributor. Her welcomed posts were in line with the theme of this blog (evidence based medicine, library-related topics), but had a fresh new look at certain topics (see for instance Grey literature time to make it systematic and Uptodate versus Dynamed. The post were written by Shamsha, but I reviewed them before publication. Because after all, I’m responsible for the blogs content.

Guest posts/co-authorships can help to post more often. Variety in topics, style and perspectives may further engage the readership and enhance traffic.

All good things. However, there is a big BUT, the BUT of quality and consistency.

If the blog has a theme or a focus, all authors should more or less adhere to it. Writers can have different opinions and perspectives but these should not be in conflict with the basic principles. And it surely shouldn’t be nonsense!

Good examples of blogs where authors replenish each other while adhering to a basic style are: Life in the Fast Lane (focus: emergency medicine and critical care, education, web.20 & fun) and the Health Informaticists (pretty much the scope of this blog: EBM, health 2.0, knowledge management).

Another good example is Science Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog. Last year however one author (Amy Tuteur) resigned after

Splitting up can be a good decision in case of unresolvable differences in approach. It was remarkable however that part of the readers (167 comments to the post) were sad about Amy Tuteur’s leave, because they found her posts stimulating and engaging. Some people like (literally) thought provoking posts, while others rather see thoughtful (and sometimes predictable) posts supported by evidence.

In his guest post “Why alternative care seems to work“, Peter Weiss assumes that people don’t try (or are even unwilling(!) to try CAM, because they don’t know the working mechanism. Weis’s post is a credulous plea for CAM:

Don’t get so hung up on the explanation that you don’t believe in, that you’re unwilling to try a practice that might actually help you. Just keep an open mind. You don’t have to know everything about how things work; you just have to know that they work. Just like, do I really understand electricity or do I just know that if I turn the light switch, the light comes on?

Weis tries to prove his point by saying that a highly prescribed drug as Lunesta has no known working mechanism either. Besides that this is ludicrous comparison, it isn’t true either. We do have a clue as to how Lunesta works (albeit falsifiable like everything in Science). Furthermore, Lunesta is effective whereas there is no such evidence for acupuncture or chiropractic. So should we just go and try and see instead of making an informed decision on basis of evidence and plausibility?

This post is unlike the critical voice we usually hear from Kevin Pho. Regularly he warns against overtreatment and unnecessary screening, for instance.

Bloggers seldom critic each other, but this quack-like post has led Steven Novella to conclude:

Weiss’s post on KevinMD is very disappointing, and unfortunately indicates that the filter on that blog for guest posts does not appear to be adequate. I hope it does not indicate a shift in philosophy away from science-based medicine, which would be worse.

Orac is much harsher. He even devotes two posts to the topic. In style with the blog title he rages a respectful insolent rant: he will remove Kevin MD from his blogroll and will cease to recommend Kevin’s blog as a reliable source of medical information.

Orac -and many of his readers are also displeased with Kevin’s response (where he does admit they are kind of right):

Orac,

I appreciate the critique. As readers of this blog know, I often post pieces here I don’t necessarily agree with myself to promote discussion and debate. Your concerns are certainly valid, and will be taken into consideration as I choose future pieces.

Basically I agree that Kevin should select more critically* and if a bad posts slips through, he should retract, openly criticize, or at least (directly) comment to the post. Indirectly saying that you will be more careful next time is not enough, IMHO. Furthermore comments were closed very soon, not giving people ample chance to respond.

On the other hand, Kevin agrees with the critique on multiple occasions. Also, I do not think that he has only traffic in mind when he includes many guest posts. He invites readers to “Submit a guest post to be heard on social media’s leading physician voice”. In line with this, Kevin once rejected a nomination in the Medgadget blog contests, probably so that some lesser known blogger would get more recognition out of the awards (roguemedic.com). Furthermore, many of the guest posts are interesting and of high quality. Thus, hopefully, this is an exception.

Anyway, this incident illustrates a pitfall of multi-author or multi-guest blogs. Posts should not be in conflict with the basic principles of the blog. This will be directly noticed by experts in the field and certainly by skeptics), who immediately pounce on any contradictory message. But eventually conflicting standpoints may also dismay or -even worse- confuse other readers (patients, lay people).

In the end blogging is not only about the traffic. It is about credibility. It is not even about your own reputation, it is about the credibility of medical blogs in general.